Every human being's real story begins here. Here, where you come further and further from people and nearer and nearer to yourself. To within whispering distance of yourself. Where your thoughts become a dialogue — with yourself and with God. Here you hold the post-mortem over dead relationships and dead successes.

But you must come far enough. You must be able to sleep with an open door. Far enough to escape the tyranny of mirrors. With only the sound of silence and simplicity to interrupt your thoughts, new realisations about life come over you like burglars, and all at once the basics are not merely no longer enough but actually superfluous, too much. A third-world existence that sticks its tongue out at the first world with its day-planners and its blood-pressure pills takes on a new — in fact, an old — meaning. You taste simplicity cautiously because it looks flavourless, but in nutritional value it is more than an antioxidant for the soul.

Every one of us has an appointment with simplicity. Whether we will keep it is another story. A sad story. Usually because of our everlasting busyness. Because if we are not at some point forced to a brutal halt, we forget about footpaths, or a farm gate that has to be opened and shut, or the pale shining of moonlight on an open veld where every movement and every shape is caught inside mysterious sharp shadows that, absolutely still, betray nothing of the night's passion.

At simplicity you learn that there are timeless things that were there long before people learned how to make money, to chase after it, or to idolise it. Before money-making and money-spending became the norm for adrenaline-addicts, people were more than content with the mere pleasure of a wind that rises from the right direction and holds within it intimate possibilities. For the one who possesses, and for the thing possessed.

Nothing comes near nature's slow-motion pace to throw your own speed back into reverse and, while you're about it, into four-wheel drive. I kept my appointment. In the company of Jürgens and Karien Schoeman, Johan Bakkes and Mooiloop (Gerrit Rautenbach) and my friends Eldré and Ruan. I could pour myself out and strip myself bare, in abandon, before the grandeur of the mighty and brave Cederberg, which swallows you whole without spitting anything out again. Silence, like noise, has to be processed. Because silence also makes a noise. Especially the veld's. It makes a noise inside you. It carries on until your own thoughts, satisfied, stop whimpering, and every preconceived idea turns around with its tail between its legs and walks away. If your spirit can manage to stand open-mouthed long enough, the veld throws its vastness deep down into you until every crack caused by over-civilisation is full again. The two of you become one and you are made new. The new you marvels over different things. Over the new garden you now walk in and pick flowers from. Because outside is now simply inside. And inside is not only beautiful. It is fruitful. A new season. Just in time.

The loveliest thing is to toss away, one by one, the crutches of civilisation. And with every toss you get a little piece of freedom back. Hair-dryers, make-up, cellphones … all the spoilers of choice.

Nature flowers without being encouraged or taught. Just on instinct. A human being who has been properly "reconnected" and made whole again also flowers on instinct. Without motivation, psychology or erudition.

Nature does not need us. We need nature.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer